like he’s about to deliver his own twisted benediction.
Pia Saves Him
I break cover and sprint for the stairs.
The floor is a football field of death—bare concrete, no shadows deep enough to hide in, nothing between me and Carlo but air and intention. My boots hammer. My lungs rip. My blood roars so loud I almost don’t hear the shot—
—I almost don’t feel the world tighten behind my spine like a held breath.
The first round slices past my back close enough that the heat of it licks my skin.
Too close.
Carlo’s laugh floats down from above, delighted. He’s already corrected his aim. He wants my back.
Wants my heart from behind.
I push harder.
Another shot cracks.
Not his.
It comes from my right.From behind me.From the one place I swore I would never hold a gun.
I skid to a stop so hard my boots scream, spinning as my pulse tries to tear through my ribs.
Pia stands in the open, exactly where I ordered her not to be.
Her hair is loose around her shoulders now, a black storm in motion. Her face is pale. Her mouth is a hard, lethal line. Both hands are locked tight around something sacred and profane all at once—
A gun.
A real one.
A guard’s fallen weapon.
Still smoking.
The shooter behind me—the one Carlo parked like a backup sin—staggers, a raw scream ripping out of his throat as his shoulder erupts red. He spins, crashes into a metal rack, drops hard and boneless like God cut the strings.
Pia fires again.
The recoil jars her arms. The shot isn’t wild.
It’s precise.
Deadlier than fear.
The man convulses once and goes still.
Silence slams into the space where noise used to live.
I stare at her like I’ve never seen her before.
Not the girl in the church.Not the polished innocence.Not the woman who breathes like sin and pretends it’s warmth.
Something else.
